Taipei Biennial 2016 marks the tenth in the series since the exhibition began in 1998. Centered on different practices of thought, the invention of discursive and performative apparatuses, and the production of images or models, the curator, Corinne Diserens explores the main theme of Gestures and Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future for the 10th edition.
The biennial’s configuration encompasses visual arts, dance, performance, music, cinema with historical evocations, editorial platforms, symposiums and workshops, leading to heterogeneous narrations allowing trans-disciplinary artistic experiences bound to a “critical intimacy” between the artwork and the visitor. Doing so, it proposes to unravel the relationship between archiving or anti-archival gestures and their modes of memorization, their readings and usage, and their potential appropriations, taking into consideration historical and cultural paradigm shifts.
Through acts of deciphering and activation, this speculative approach will explore the catalytic role of museums among knowledge systems, different geographies and artistic experimentations, firmly grasping realities taking place concurrently, realities to come, or realities whose advent is impossible. The biennial also explores the understanding of art as an epistemological apparatus that bridges works with various contexts and in doing so reconfigures the logic of the common.
Diserens also refers to the question posed by anthropologist David Graeber in his work, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy: how to formulate a coherent critique of institutional bureaucracy and its structural violence in order that human imagination and radical thought do not lose their vital center, as well as how to disarm configurations of power, including “the power of display” proposed by artist Peter Friedl, and how the state of consciousness with which something is produced creates a liberated zone.
About the exhibition
Dates: 2016/09/10 - 2017/02/05
Venue: Lobby, Gallery 1A&1B, Gallery 2A&2B, Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum, for further information please visit www.tfam.museum.
